Picked herring and strawberry ice cream the languages of Western Europe are written using the Latin script: Germanic languages (English, German, Swed- Nish, Dutch etc.), Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese) and other languages such as Finnish (a Finno-Ugric lan- guage) or Welsh (a Celtic language). In Central and Eastern Europe, lan- guages spoken primarily by members of Roman Catholic or Protestant churches use Latin script: this includes all Western Slavic languages (e.g. Polish, Czech, Slovak), some Southern Slavic languages (Slovenian, the Croatian version of Serbo-Croatian), Baltic languages (Latvian, Lithu- anian) and Finno-Ugric languages (Hungarian, Estonian). Latin script is also used to write other languages spoken all around the world (e.g. Albanian, Aleut, Fijian, Greenlandic, Malay, Maltese, Navajo, Ndebele, Quechua, Samoan, Swahili, Vietnamese, Wolof, and many others). In the early Middle Ages, people of Western and Central Europe spoke many languages, but most of the writing was still done in the Latin lan- guage, the lingua franca of those times. If a geographic or personal name from the region of today’s France, Germany, or Poland had to be written down, a scribe tried to express sounds not present in the Latin language by approximating them somehow using the Latin letters. These ‘rules of spelling’ varied heavily from case to case. Gradually from approximately the 9th century on, and more rapidly during the high and late Middle Ages, the number of texts written in local languages increased. Finally, the Reformation movement and Gutenberg’s invention of casting mov- able type boosted the market for publications written in Europe’s local and national languages. The invention of movable type emphasized the need for standardized and simplified character sets and spelling rules: the printers wished to minimize the set of characters they used, the publications were reaching a much larger audience, and the first kinds of publishing processes were introduced giving birth to professions such as typesetter and proofread- er. Authors and printers tried to find efficient ways to write sounds not found in Latin. One approach was to use combinations of two or more letters (digraphs, trigraphs). Another method was to employ ‘accented’ [ 148 ] [ 149 ] Adam Twardoch • Polish diacritics letters, equipped with diacritical marks — small signs (dots, curves, circles, dashes) attached to or placed above or below the base letterform, indicating a modified phonetic value (from the Greek word diakritikós meaning ‘distinctive’). Yet another technique was to use extra letters or letterlike characters. In a Europe split by national and religious borders, each language developed its own way of using Latin letters and diacrit- ics. The sound of a palatalized s, as in the word ‘shop’, can be written as sh in English, as sch, s, g and ch in German (depending on dialects and context), as ch in French, as sz and ś in Polish, and as š in Czech. A set of more than 150 alphabetic characters is needed to write all Latin-scripted languages of modern Europe. Type designers from Western Europe and North America, and more recently from other countries, have been refining and improving the style and appearance of Latin letterforms for centuries. With several thousand typefaces designed to date, the Latin letters have been used to set text in a multitude of languages, and have been on display and under the critique of designers and readers from many countries throughout many years. The Latin letter has become a truly global medium, serv- ing cultures from around the world. On the other hand, the evolution of diacritics usually occured in isolation. From language to language and from country to country, diacritical marks have gained different shapes and different positions. Before the invention of laser printers, personal computers, and digi- tal fonts, typefaces were developed for particular markets and printing equipment. Lead type was cut by punchcutters familiar with the specif- ics of a given language. In England, Germany, France, or Italy, printers bought type from local foundries. Polish printing houses imported type from Italy or Germany, but then resident Polish punchcutters localized the fonts, i.e. added the accented letters. There was no global typography. Even in the 20th century, typefaces were made for particular typeset- ting and phototypesetting systems. As a result of the political division of Europe after World War II, most typefaces used in the Slavic-speaking countries were developed or at least localized there. Desktop publishing systems brought substantial changes to the font business. Large foundries ceased to exist or completely changed their profiles. Small companies and individuals started designing and releas- ing digital fonts. With Fontographer, everybody was able to try his or her hand at designing type. The ‘digital revolution’ started in the USA and in Western Europe, so most digital fonts were designed there, but designers proficient in Latin [ 148 ] [ 149 ] Language Culture Type letterforms lacked the know-how to draw foreign diacritics properly. Specimens showing well-designed Slavic diacritics, written in ‘unintel- ligible’ languages like Czech or Polish were hardly available in the West. But market pressures forced foundries to release fonts quickly. Consequently, the quality of diacritics is poor (with a few notable ex- ceptions). French or German accents are usually acceptable, but Slavic diacritics are mostly mediocre. The design of those characters often does not match the overall typeface style. The accents are misplaced, their color and stress do not go well with the letters. Sometimes, accents are simply borrowed from a different typeface. The Unicode Standard favors unification of diacritical marks, which means that each font can only have one glyph of a given kind (unless advanced techniques like language-dependant OpenType layout features are used). However, typographic traditions in shaping or positioning ac- cented letters vary among countries or languages. Instead of a separate umlaut sign for German (mögen, to like) and a tréma sign for Spanish (güisqui, whisky) or French (Noël, Christmas), the Unicode Standard encodes just one diaeresis mark (+008), which is to be used for both umlaut and tréma. The problem is most evident in display typography. In Germany, it is permitted to place the umlaut inside the capital U or the O, but Span- ish or French readers may find it unacceptable. Similarly, the preferred angle, size, and placement of the acute mark (´, +004) may vary from country to country, depending on national traditions. The Polish lan- guage uses an acute-like mark (´, Polish kreska) and a dot mark ( ˙, Polish kropka), while French uses acute (´, French accent aigu), grave ( `), circum- flex( ˆ ), and occasionally diaeresis ( ¨, French tréma). To visually differenti- ate acute from grave in French, the accents need to have a pronounced slant to the left or to the right, but do not necessarily have to be very tall. In Polish, however, the kreska only needs a little slant to the right, but should be tall enough not to be confused with kropka. The Czech language also makes very extensive use of the acute mark (Czech čárka). When text is set in all capitals and there is little space above A or O, the accents need to be ‘compressed’. In Czech, the accent typically becomes very flat, nearly horizontal, and touches the letter or remains above it. In Polish, the accent gets reduced in size but remains rather vertical, with little slant to the right. It stays above, touches the letter, or even pierces the top of the letter (figure 1). It is important to understand that diacritical marks are not an extra ‘gadget’ in written text. They are an essential element of the written lan- [ 150 ] [ 151 ] Adam Twardoch • Polish diacritics Figure 1: In display typography, accents may need to be ‘compressed’ when text is set in all capitals. This can be done differently depending on language. Left: Czech lettering by Jaroslav Šváb (1967), right: Polish lettering by Witold Chmielewski (1957). Figure 2: Diacritics need to harmonize with the design of the typeface (top). Poorly designed diacritics may ruin the overall appearance of the text (bottom). guage; they need to harmonize with the overall design of the typeface just as much as the figures or punctuation marks do. The diacritical marks need to match the design of the basic letterforms in color, shape, stress and contrast. An accented letter must be designed in such a way that it is clearly distinguishable from another accented letter and from the basic letter. Poorly designed diacritics may ruin the overall appearance of a typeface and may seriously impair the legibility of the text. Figure 2 shows well designed and poorly designed Polish diacritics for Helvetica. Please note the bad spacing of the letters łkły in the word pożółkłymi in the bottom example. The reader is likely to ignore thin and poorly drawn ogoneks, thus misreading the text. The oldest Polish sentence recorded in writing can be found in the Latin text Księga Henrykowska (Henry’s Book, 1270): day ut ia pobrusa a ti poziwai (‘giveth to me, I shall stir and you shall rest’). In today’s spell- ing, the sentence would be: daj, ać ja pobruszę, a ty poczywaj. We see that written language of the 13th century did not make use of diacritics. Over a century later, the essay Orthographia Bohemica, published 1406 or 1412 and attributed to the most important 15th-century Czech religious [ 150 ] [ 151 ] Language Culture Type reformer, Jan Hus, presented a modern, consistent phonetic method of writing the Czech language. The author suggested denoting long vowels with an acute mark and palatalized consonants with a dot, which later evolved into a caron ( ˇ, Cz. háček) above the letter. Hus’s system greatly influenced other European languages by being the very first to constitute the principle of using diacritics to write distinctive sounds.